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Australia Earth News

Police in Australia Are Accusing 24 People of Deliberately Setting Bushfires (cnn.com) 176

The Australia wildfires are a countrywide catastrophe, mainly caused by drought and extreme heat, but dozens of people are directly to blame for some of the problem, officials say. From a report: Police have charged at least 24 people for intentionally starting bushfires in the state of New South Wales, according to a statement the New South Wales Police released Monday. NSW Police have taken legal action against 183 people, 40 of whom are juveniles, for fire-related offenses since November 8, the statement said. The legal actions range from cautions to criminal charges. Out of those 183 people, 53 have received cautions or criminal charges for failing to comply with a total fire ban and 47 are accused of discarding a lit cigarette or match on land, according to the police statement. At least 24 people have died nationwide during this fire season. While the fires have touched every state in Australia, New South Wales has been the hardest hit. Further reading: Bots and trolls spread false arson claims in Australian fires 'disinformation campaign'.
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Police in Australia Are Accusing 24 People of Deliberately Setting Bushfires

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  • Scale (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeathToBill ( 601486 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @11:05AM (#59599222) Journal
    There is recent academic literature suggesting there are as many as 31,000 deliberately lit bushfires (most of them very small scale, one has to presume) in Australia each year. I'm not sure arresting 24 people for starting them should be as big a news item as it seems to be. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/wor... [bbc.co.uk]
    • There's a huge online campaign to brand this all as "arson" so as to distract and deflect from this being seriously exacerbated by climate change. Australia is the largest coal exporter in the world.

      • Whether there is a current campaign or not, the article I linked was published in September and the literature it links to is considerably older than that. This is not part of that campaign.
      • should have known there was an angle.
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        There's a huge online campaign to brand this all as "arson" so as to distract and deflect from this being seriously exacerbated by climate change. Australia is the largest coal exporter in the world.

        It's caused by extremely dry weather exacerbated by climate change. But that won't cause dry trees to spontaneously ignite.

        Here our wildfires are caused by lightning, discarded cigarettes (smokers cause most of the incidents along roadways), outdoor motorized activity (ATVs, motocross, etc - either from hot exh

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by sexconker ( 1179573 )

        Fuck off, retard. The exact opposite is the case. People like you are trying to blame it all on climate change when it's just fucking arson.

      • There's a huge online campaign to brand this all as "arson"

        You think 24 cases are some "branding campaign"? Mate, the entire fucking continent is on fire. We have more than enough blame to go around.

        Climate Change
        Arson
        Accidents
        Funding of firefighting services
        Protests against backburning
        Reduction in backburning funds
        Climate change causing weather patterns which prevent backburning while blowing a cool breeze making it pleasant for protesters to stand outside smoking a cigarette which may fall from their mouths.

        Let the "branding" go on. We can dedicate a state per de

    • There is recent academic literature suggesting there are as many as 31,000 deliberately lit bushfires (most of them very small scale, one has to presume) in Australia each year. I'm not sure arresting 24 people for starting them should be as big a news item as it seems to be.

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/wor... [bbc.co.uk]

      I don't live in Australia so I don't know what the local reaction is to the story, but we have a similar issue here in the States and arsonists piling on to big fires makes headlines.

      I know this story shocks me.

  • by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @11:11AM (#59599252)
    So many people in the world today just simply don't give a flying f*ck about how their actions affect others. I propose a 'jerk multiplier' to fines and jail sentences for offenses like this. Sure, carelessly throwing a cigarette on the ground might not be a huge deal in most cases. In this case, doing so makes you a huge jerk and should come with much stiffer penalties. This could apply to all sorts of things, like porch-pirating Christmas presents.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rldp ( 6381096 )

      These people believe they are doing good because they are causing awareness of global warming or some such shit.

      It's a munchausens syndrome by proxy thing.

      Same way Jussie Smollet convinced himself he was fighting racism by creating a racism hoax.

    • My biggest complaint against cigarette smokers is that a disproportionate number of them seem to see the world as a place to discard their cigarette related trash. I don't even see other sorts of smokers who leave evidence of this around. Look at any curb or bus stop; very few discarded soda cans, chip wrappers, and so on. Cig buttts? Everywhere.

      • My biggest complaint against cigarette smokers is that a disproportionate number of them seem to see the world as a place to discard their cigarette related trash. I don't even see other sorts of smokers who leave evidence of this around. Look at any curb or bus stop; very few discarded soda cans, chip wrappers, and so on. Cig buttts? Everywhere.

        The issue will not go away.

        Cities should provide ashtrays.

        • Cities should provide ashtrays.

          Or, instead of the taxpayers footing the bill for ashtrays, how about the smokers bring their own? Or better yet, stop smoking all together.

          Or is that too much like personal responsibility?

      • by G00F ( 241765 )

        Every smoker litters. Every single one!

        Cars use to come with ash trays, but no one ever used them so auto manufactures stopped putting them in (I saw a few in 70's and 80's but none sine the 90's).

        But people still smoke, and where does that cig butt go? Out the window.

        Oh, and while it's burning, where are they dumping the ash? Yup, even those that throw the butt in the garbage still dumps the ash where ever it pleases them.

  • Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby@ c o m c a s t . net> on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @11:30AM (#59599354)

    The headline is misleading. 24 people have been arrested in NSW alone:

    https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/... [nsw.gov.au]

    Queensland alone has arrested 101 people for starting fire related offenses recently:
    https://www.news.com.au/nation... [news.com.au]

    Here's another source showing more than 180 people have been arrested for starting fires:
    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/... [thesun.co.uk]
    https://www.theaustralian.com.... [theaustralian.com.au]

    Australia has a long history of people setting fires in the bush deliberately or inadvertently. Here's an article on a someone who studied a previous year:
    https://www.smh.com.au/nationa... [smh.com.au]

    Australia has had hotter and drier years on record without having this level of raging bush fires. Australia has a history of people setting bushfires deliberately and inadvertently. Australia has already arrested over 180 people this summer for arson charges. These things just might have something to do with the fact that Australia presently has a lot of bushfires. Occam's razor just might apply to this situation as well as it does most other situations.

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      You don't post a link to the statistics showing hotter and drier years so that claim is a little harder to test, but I'll take it at face value.

      For how long, though? The way I understand it, one of the problems is they practically haven't seen rain for multiple years. I'm pretty sure one year of having an average of, let's say 42C, followed by a rainy season, is less hazardous than three consecutive years with an average of 41C and no rain.

    • User onyxruby is misstating the information in the links they provide.
      Being 'cautioned' by police is not the same as being arrested.

      • Rubbish. I supplied multiple links. NSW alone had 24 arrests for arson. That is just one state in Australia. I supplied this link in one of my comments directly from the police department. For the story headline to be accurate and me to be wrong you would have to presume that no other state had arrested someone for arson and that all the other articles that were linked from multiple sources were false. You would also need to offer some kind of citation to prove that Occamâ(TM)s razor has failed spectac

    • Australia has had hotter and drier years on record without having this level of raging bush fires

      According to the Australian bureau of meteorology, 2019 was the hottest and driest on record. [sbs.com.au]

      Do you have a more credible source than the Bureau for your claim that there have been hotter & drier years?

    • by trawg ( 308495 )

      I drove up to the Sunshine Coast over Xmas and saw a patch of burned out area alongside the freeway - not huge, maybe 30sqm? - roughly exactly where a lit cigarette flicked out of the window would have landed. I cannot imagine how many fires are started through the complete negligence of smokers.

      Bring on e-cigarettes!

  • Bots? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by skovnymfe ( 1671822 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @11:42AM (#59599392)
    Bots and trolls spread false arson claims in Australian fires ‘disinformation campaign’ https://www.theguardian.com/au... [theguardian.com]
    • You mean the bots and trolls from The NSW Police force? https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/... [nsw.gov.au]

      That's a lot of real arrests for your assertion of false arson. What are you afraid of, that someone is trying to blame arson instead of climate change, or instead of the government? Let them. There's a lot of fire out there and we have plenty of blame to go around.

  • by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @12:47PM (#59599664) Journal

    A lot of this is back-burning, to save your own property. This is also how controlled burns are done, except ideally a controlled burn is lit along a contiguous perimeter so that the fires burn into themselves and go out once all the fuel within that perimeter is consumed.

    So the gist of it is you wait until the wind is low, then you start a fire along your property. It slowly travels as it burns deadfall / brush, consuming fire AWAY from your property. Once that fuel is consumed you don't have to worry about fires coming in the other direction. Eventually the fire hits larger areas of fuel, and winds pick up intensifying the fire, and it all gets out of control. But... at least your property is now safe.

    The rangers do controlled burns in the mountains around here. They have fire roads (just dirt roads) all over the mountains. Before the burn they use four wheelers that pull a powerful leaf blower trailer contraption behind it. They use these to clean leaves off of the fire roads and push them back into the woods to make sure there's a good barrier. Then they simply light fires along the fire roads to define an enclosed perimeter. The fires all ideally meet in the middle, all the fuel has been consumed, and it goes out. These are in national forest lands though that have no structures in them.

    • by Matheus ( 586080 )

      I'm presuming there is also a fair amount of "I've always done this.. their fire ban is unnecessary!" going on not understanding the dramatically higher combustibility of the area... Kind of like "Yeah that little fire would have been OK normally but you didn't notice the stacks of gunpowder that are now sitting in the corner..."

      Especially with the disinformation campaign going on it's hard to see what's really happening here "legally". The stats for how many people who have been arrested for "Intentionally

    • A lot of this is back-burning, to save your own property. This is also how controlled burns are done

      Nope, precisely none of this is. When you backburn in Australia on your property you inform the fire department that you do it and then the police don't come around and arrest you, unlike what we're talking which is the police charging people for arson.

      In fact TFS mentions clearly that the number of people who would fall under your statistic is at most 53 of the listed cases and people who have land to manage are rarely stupid enough to end up in those statistics.

  • by ledow ( 319597 )

    I blame the Colombian guy from Crocodile Dundee II.

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. -- Theophrastus

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